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Race was a minefield for Obama, but Trump stomps through unconcerned: Opinion

Updated on August 22, 2017 at 3:57 PMPosted on August 22, 2017 at 1:33 PM

In this photo taken Feb. 16, 2017, President Donald Trump's White House Senior Adviser Steve Bannon arrives for a news conference with President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Bannon, a forceful but divisive presence in President Donald Trump's White House, is leaving. Trump accepted Bannon's resignation Friday, Aug. 18, 2017, ending a turbulent seven months for his chief strategist, the latest to depart from the president's administration in turmoil.

In this photo taken Feb. 16, 2017, President Donald Trump's White House Senior Adviser Steve Bannon arrives for a news conference with President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Bannon, a forceful but divisive presence in President Donald Trump's White House, is leaving. Trump accepted Bannon's resignation Friday, Aug. 18, 2017, ending a turbulent seven months for his chief strategist, the latest to depart from the president's administration in turmoil. (AP Photo / Andrew Harnik)

Almost three years after Barack Obama's was elected president, I came across the edition of The New York Times that published news of that historic event. It stopped me in my tracks. Below the fold was a story called "After Decades, A Time to Reap" quoting civil rights veterans on Obama's election. The Rev. Charles M. Sherrod, who had worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, said for that story, "This is what we prayed for. This is what we worked for."

It was 2011 when I was looking at that newspaper, and I knew then that Obama's election had not been an answer to Sherrod's prayer.

In 2010 the Obama administration had foolishly fired the Rev. Sherrod's wife, Shirley Sherrod, from her position as the Georgia state rural development director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Andrew Breitbart, creator of an eponymous right-wing news site, published a selectively edited speech to make it appear that Shirley Sherrod, angry at the discrimination that black farmers had suffered, had reciprocated by withholding help from a white farmer. It wasn't true. But the Obama administration, acting out of the fear that his presidency would be characterized as hostile to white people and overly solicitous to black people, moved against Shirley Sherrod quickly, without even pausing to consider that Breitbart was up to no good.

The year before the Sherrod video, Obama had said -- quite correctly -- that a Cambridge, Mass., police officer had "acted stupidly" when he responded to a report of a possible break-in and then arrested black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. after the professor provided proof that he lived there. The blowback was fierce. Though White House officials said Obama was uninvolved in Sherrod's firing, it's still correct to say that his administration acted stupidly in response to that made up controversy.

This is what we prayed for?

Shirley Sherrod was fired in large part because the president of the United States was uncomfortable being pegged as black people's president. What a contrast he is to Donald Trump, who is so comfortable with being seen as the president for white people -- including white nationalists and right-wing extremists -- that he brought Breitbart editor Steve Bannon into the White House as chief strategist. Hostility to nonwhite people and Jews and Muslims is and has been Breitbart's stock-in-trade. Despite that -- actually, because of that -- Trump hired Bannon.

And it took somebody dying for Trump to fire him.

Heather Heyer, 32, was showing her opposition to the so-called alt-right Aug. 12 when police say James Fields Jr., who was protesting with a neo-Nazi group plowed his car into a crowd where Heyer stood. Six days later, Trump severed ties with Bannon, the purveyor of alt-right propaganda he had welcomed into the West Wing.

There is a common misconception that because black voters were so defensive of Obama and his presidency that he was equally defensive of black people and their political interests. But the speed at which he shifted gears from condemning Gates' arrest to inviting the arresting officer to the White House for beer was an example of him wilting in the heat of white anger. The quick termination of Shirley Sherrod is another. The White House offered her a new job, but she said no thanks.

The black people who defended him so vigorously did so, I think, because they understood that even being the so-called leader of the free world did not free him to speak candidly about race. If anything, the opposite was true. Any candid commentary on race in America challenges the myth that America has forever been a land of fairness and equal opportunity. Woe to the president who contradicts that mythology.

In 2014, after the St. Louis County district attorney said there'd be no criminal charges for the Ferguson police officer who killed black teenager Michael Brown, Obama didn't even use the words "black" or "African-American" to describe the people most likely to be angry. He didn't say that black people are being discriminated against in our criminal justice system, only that "communities of color" often feel like there's discrimination. He was showing us, I wrote then, how hard it is to be both black and president.

Trump got elected by embodying white rage and resentment. And by hiring Bannon he signaled his intent to keep stoking the flames of white rage and resentment from the White House. But not even Trump's firing of Bannon, or his recently scripted words condemning bigotry, suggests he will fundamentally change. As he boarded Air Force One for Arizona Tuesday morning, rumors swirled that he would pardon Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff convicted of defying a federal court that ordered him to cease his patrols targeting immigrants. Trump said Aug. 14 that he was "seriously considering" such a pardon.

That's the difference between Obama's administration and Trump's. In Obama's, a false allegation of bigotry could get a person fired. In Trump's, open and blatant expressions of bigotry are rewarded.